


Ephemeral

by thisprettywren



Series: Silence is to sound [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: M/M, Post Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-15
Updated: 2012-06-15
Packaged: 2017-11-07 20:28:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/435115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisprettywren/pseuds/thisprettywren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock has sent messages, but these he’s kept.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ephemeral

Sherlock has never been bothered by impermanence before, the mutability of pixels always an advantage rather than a liability. But impermanence has become safety has become limbo transmuted into his own private hell, so he presses pen to hoarded scraps of paper, revels in the physicality of ink incised in pressed fibre, in the sensation of the writing itself.

He’d carve the letters into his own flesh if they weren’t already inscribed there, bone-deep. He can feel the etchings of them, echoes of words like smudged fingerprints that ache as if it’s the most important thing he can do.

(He thinks, perhaps, it is.)

The law of conservation of energy. It means something. It’s all just physics, space and heliocentric time, and if the planets can hold a song then surely his marrow can house a name. He's not fool enough to think that carries meaning of its own, not nearly so sentimental or kind, but the fact remains: logical or not, he has to try.

So Sherlock has sent messages, but these he’s kept.

Hoarded scraps of paper made brittle and crease-worn, filthy. He folds them again, slots them into a pocket as though mere stitched cloth can hold them. He doesn’t know if any of the other words have made it back but these—

These he carries, and he’s going home.

Sherlock gets off the train and just walks, his feet on the pavement and the air in his throat. Past the surgery, and he means to stop but when the moment comes he understands: there’s home and there’s away, and if he means to return he hasn’t yet arrived. 

His feet on the pavement and he has to learn this again, relearn all of it, the barriers of his own skin against the London air. Where he begins, where he ends. He's falsified so many endings, but there are folded scraps of paper in his pocket and they mean something. They must. 

He was here. He was; he is. He'll learn.

It’s terrifyingly simple to pick the lock. Then he’s inside and all he can do is breathe and breathe through the tightness in his chest, hemmed in by skin as thin as paper, as thin as thought itself.

It was cold outside, his fingers gone slightly numb with it, but inside it's warm. His hands ache as the feeling returns to them. It hurts. They hurt.

He'll learn.

*****

In the end it’s John that comes to him, though it’s Sherlock who's gone and Sherlock who’s returned. It’s always John who meets him, meets Sherlock where he is and beyond. Sherlock might be a ghost but John is ruthlessly alive and it’s Sherlock who’s come home.

*****

The flat is yellow-shadowed by streetlights by the time the door opens and John comes in, still smelling of the pub, wearing a smile that slides from his face along with the colours when he flips on the light to see Sherlock sitting there.

“Oh,” he says, a rough-edged exhale of a word, and Sherlock finds he’s forgotten how to breathe.

John turns, deliberately strips his jacket off his shoulders, down his arms, compact concise movements as he places it on its hook. 

Sherlock can’t seem to move.

John turns to face him, weight on his heels, hands loose and ready at his sides. “Oh,” he says again, and Sherlock feels the blood rush up the back of his neck, hot and dense. His tongue is thick in his mouth, stumbling against his teeth.

There was an evening outside St Peterburg when he took up a pen and realised he didn't know how to write John's name in the Cyrillic alphabet. It was immaterial but had left him feeling lost all the same, unmoored. The great Sherlock Holmes, confounded by a consonant. There's something like humour in it, in retrospect, so long as he didn't let himself think of the way he'd passed the night on a bench across from a closed internet cafe, telling himself that if he made it to morning (wasn't arrested, attacked; didn't do something immensely stupid to make either of those things happen more quickly, please, just something of some _permanence_ —) he would email John, he would. He would. 

But when the proprietor appeared at half eight to unlock the door Sherlock broke his promise to himself. It wasn't safe. None of it; not yet.

So he turned away. 

Four days later one more agent of Moriarty's agents was dead, one more strand of the web unravelled, and he left Russia behind him.

"John," he says, tasting the shape of the letters.

“Don’t.” John’s eyes are blue as ever, more lined than in his memory. “Just don’t. There was a funeral, you know. A headstone with your name on it.” There’s a flush rising up his throat, blood visible beneath the thin barrier of his skin, the manifestation of the physical workings of his physical body, soft and fragile and intensely present.

Sherlock can’t feel his feet in his shoes, on the carpet. Finally rooted after so long, and when he aches to move.

"I sent messages," he manages, his voice sounding strange to his own ears, hollow and bottomless. 

"Oh yes," John says, lips curling up into something too sharp-edged to be a smile. "I got that one. One sodding line about a tragedy, you melodramatic bastard. Well done there, mate. Cheers."

Relief floods Sherlock's system with overwhelming warmth, his skin prickling with it. He sways a bit, steadying himself with one hand on the back of the armchair.

But no-- John--

 _Wrong_.

Sherlock blinks up at him, bewildered. John's eyes are so blue that it takes him the space of several breaths for understanding to float to the surface of his thoughts. The first message had gotten through but the others— 

It had been too much to hope. He'd known it at the time. Foolish, stupid.

"No," Sherlock finally manages to say. "I tried to— I—"

"Of course," John interrupts him. "How idiotic of me, presuming there might be something about all this that wasn't about you." His tone is biting and somehow breathless. "A thousand apologies."

 _Of course it was about me_ , Sherlock thinks, _everything you are is about me_ , but even he knows that isn't the right thing to say, that the words have gone jumbled and unruly within his own mind. He closes his eyes because he just— just needs to think.

He feels John's arm against his chest before he registers his own lost balance. There's a long moment of tension as they collide, find each other, seeking a point of equilibrium between the individual coils of tension in their spines. 

Then Sherlock exhales hard and both of John's arms slide around his shoulders, his palms warm against Sherlock's back through the thin fabric of his shirt. His hair is soft and alive against the skin of Sherlock's throat, the underside of his chin, as he buries his forehead in the space below Sherlock's clavicle and Sherlock just rests his cheek on the top of John's head, breathing in the warmth and scent of him.

"Thank God." John's voice is muffled against Sherlock's chest, carried on a sound that's halfway to a laugh, and Sherlock feels himself relax, if only fractionally, with the movement of his own arms to wrap around John's back. "Sherlock. Christ, I'm so glad to— thank _God_."

John's back is warm under his hands, rising and falling with his breath which is already steadying toward even. Sherlock keeps his eyes closed against the sudden dizzying thought that he might have failed, might have returned to find John gone, left or dead or— 

"Sherlock." John's voice is low and tight with concern and Sherlock forces his fingers to unclench so that they're no longer digging into John's back. 

John tries to pull away but Sherlock can't, he just— he can't. He keeps his cheek pressed to the top of John's head, his left arm locked around John's shoulders. 

There are things John needs to know, things he needs 

(yes, things _he_ needs; these are Sherlock's needs, he understands well enough to tell the difference)

John to know, but there's a tightness in his throat. He slides a hand into a pocket and emerges with papers clutched tight between his fingers. They aren't shaking, quite. His hand hovers awkwardly in the air at his side until John notices and rests his own hand lightly against it, the fingers warm and dry.

Sherlock fights down the urge to jerk his hand away, just to feel those fingers wrap tighter around his wrist. Just to feel John grip him deliberately, _hold on_. Sherlock's been fighting both sides of this battle, the pull toward and the pull away, for so long. It's exhausting, on his own. But then, he supposes John knows all about that, too. 

Sherlock doesn't pull away; John's hold on him has withstood continents; Sherlock doesn't need to prove it to himself now.

John turns his head to look at their hands, still joined in midair. "Are these for me?"

"They're mine," Sherlock says. It's true; he's carried them with him even when he had nothing else. Especially when he had nothing else. The words on those pages are his in every way that counts; his in ways even he doesn't fully understand. His, for John. 

Sherlock clears his throat. "They're mine," he says again, feeling the beginnings of his own smile in the movement of John's hair under his cheek, "so. Yes."

"Okay," John says, taking the bundle of papers and sliding it into his own pocket, where it belongs. "Okay." 

John's hand comes to rest again on Sherlock's shoulder, steady as ever. _Impermanence_ , Sherlock thinks, _has become something entirely new._


End file.
